UC-NRLF 


$B    i43=]    flb? 


^7x \yfurr&e' ^&Afi&ri<4 


Ctriwcrjs'/y' *J  jrja/t/ortua' 


<±*jpfc     c^CC,    /<^~  <*(  '  'ck^L  /Cc 

1      iftc.;"-  Z^y  y^'    t^^ 


THIS  IS  THE  PREACHMENT*** 
ON  GOING  TO  CHURCH««*WRIT 
BY  GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 
AND  DONE  INTO  PRINT  AT  THE 
ROYCROFT  PRINTING  SHOP  A 
WHICH  IS  IN  EAST  AURORA, 
NEW  YORK,  U.  S.  A. 

MDCCCXCVI 


WCNRY  MORSE  STBTHCH* 


Copyright  1896 

by 

The  Roycroft  Printing  Shop 


511245 


On  Going  To  Church. 


J 


I 

O  ME,  as  a  modern 
man,  concerned  with 
matters  of  fine  art  and 
living  in  London  by  the 
sweat  of  my  brain,  'tis 
a  grim  fact  that  I  dwell 
in  a  world  which,  unable  to  live  by 
bread  alone,  lives  spiritually  on  alco- 
hol and  morphia  $$  Young  and  ex- 
cessively sentimental  city  people  live 
on  love,  and  delight  in  poetry  or  fine 
writing  which  declares  that  love  is 
Alpha  and  Omega.  But  an  attentive 
examination  will  generally  establish 
the  fact  that  this  kind  of  love,  ethe- 
real as  it  seems,  is  merely  a  symp- 
tom of  the  drugs  I  have  mentioned, 
and  does  not  occur  independently  ex- 
cept in  those  persons  whose  normal 
state  is  similar  to  that  induced  in 
/  healthy  persons  by  narcotic  stimu- 
lants dips  If  from  the  fine  art  of  to-day 
we   set   aside   feelingless   or  prosaic 

i 


A 


ONGOING 

art,  which  is,  properly,  not  fine  art  at 
all,  we  may  safely  refer  most  of  the 
rest  to  feeling  produced  by  the  teapot, 
the  bottle,  or  the  hypodermic  syr- 
inge fjgb 

An  exhibition  of  the  cleverest  men 
and  women  in  London  at  five  p.  m., 
with  their  afternoon  tea  cut  off,  would 
shatter  many  illusions.  Tea  and  cof- 
fee and  cigarettes  produce  conversa- 
tion ;  lager  beer  and  pipes  produce 
routine  journalism ;  wine  and  gal- 
antry  produce  brilliant  journalism, 
essays  and  novels  ;  brandy  and  cigars 
produce  violently  devotional  or  erotic 
poetry ;  morphia  produces  tragic  ex- 
altation (useful  on  the  stage);  and  so- 
briety produces  an  average  curate's 
sermon. 

GAIN,  strychnine  and  ar- 
senic may  be  taken  as  pick- 
me-ups  ;  doctors  quite  un- 
derstand   that    "  tonics' ' 
mean  drams  of  ether ;  chlorodyne  is  a 
universal  medicine  ;  chloral,  sulphon- 
al  and  the  like  call  up  Nature's  great 
2 


TO  CHURCH. 

destroyer,  artificial  sleep  ;  bromide  of 
potassium  will  reduce  the  over-sensi- 
tive man  of  genius  to  a  condition  in 
which  the  alighting  of  a  wasp  on  his 
naked  eyeball  will  not  make  him 
wink ;  hasheesh  tempts  the  dreamer 
by  the  Oriental  glamour  of  its  reputa- 
tion ;  and  gin  is  a  cheap  substitute 
for  all  these  anodynes  ^j  Most  of  the 
activity  of  the  Press,  the  Pulpit,  the 
Platform  and  the  Theatre  is  only  a 
sympton  of  the  activity  of  the  drug 
trade,  the  tea  trade,  the  tobacco  trade 
and  the  liquor  trade.  The  world  is  not 
going  from  bad  to  worse,  it  is  true  ; 
but  the  increased  facilities  which  con- 
stitute the  advance  of  civilization  in- 
clude facilities  for  drugging  one's  self. 
These  facilities  wipe  whole  races  of 
black  men  off  the  face  of  the  earth ; 
and  every  extension  and  refinement 
of  them  picks  a  stratum  out  of  white 
society  and  devotes  it  to  destruction. 
Such  traditions  of  the  gross  old  habits 
as  have  reached  me  seem  to  be  based 
on  the  idea  of  first  doing  your  day's 

3 


ON  GOING 

work  and  then  enjoying  yourself  by 
getting  drunk  S£  Nowadays  you  get 
drunk  to  enable  you  to  begin  work. 

HAKESPERE'S    oppor- 
tunities of  meddling  with 
^SJ^SjlJjhis     nerves    were     much 
K*£s5$v3more  limited  than  Dante 


Rossetti's  ;  but  it  is  not  clear  that  the 
advantages  of  the  change  lay  with 
Rossetti.  Besides,  though  Shakespere 
may,  as  tradition  asserts,  have  died 
of  drink  in  a  ditch,  he  at  all  events 
conceived  alcohol  as  an  enemy  put  by 
a  man  into  his  own  mouth  to  steal 
away  his  brains ;  whereas  the  mod- 
ern man  conceives  it  as  an  indispen- 
sable means  of  setting  his  brains  go- 
ing. We  drink  and  drug,  not  for  the 
pleasure  of  it,  but  for  Dutch  inspira- 
tion and  by  the  advice  of  our  doctors, 
as  duelists  drink  for  Dutch  courage 
by  the  advice  of  their  seconds  %  Ob- 
viously this  systematic,  utilitarian 
drugging  and  stimulating,  though  nec- 
essarily "moderate"  (so  as  not  to 
defeat  its  own  object),  is  more  dan- 
4 


TO  CHURCH. 

gerous  than  the  old  boozing  if  we  are 
to  regard  the  use  of  stimulants  as  an 
evil. 

S  for  me,  I  do  not  clearly 
X  see  where  a  scientific  line 
can  be  drawn  between  food 
and  stimulants.  I  cannot 
say,  like  Ninon  de  l'Enclos,  that  a 
bowl  of  soup  intoxicates  me ;  but  it 
stimulates  me  as  much  as  I  want  to 
be  stimulated,  which  is,  perhaps,  all 
that  Ninon  meant.  Still,  I  have  not 
failed  to  observe  that  all  the  drugs, 
from  tea  to  morphia,  and  all  the 
drams,  from  lager  beer  to  brandy,  dull 
the  edge  of  self-criticism  and  make  a 
man  content  with  something  less  than 
the  best  work  of  which  he  is  soberly 
capable  $&  He  thinks  his  work  better, 
when  he  is  really  only  more  easily 
satisfied  with  himself.  Those  whose 
daily  task  is  only  a  routine,  for  the 
sufficient  discharge  of  which  a  man 
need  hardly  be  more  than  half  alive, 
may  seek  this  fool's  paradise  without 
detriment  to  their  work ;  but  to  those 

5 


ON  GOING 

professional  men  whose  art  affords 
practically  boundless  scope  for  skill  of 
execution  and  elevation  of  thought,  to 
take  drug  or  dram  is  to  sacrifice  the 
keenest,  most  precious  part  of  life  to 
a  dollop  of  lazy  and  vulgar  comfort 
for  which  no  true  man  of  genius 
should  have  any  greater  stomach  than 
the  lady  of  the  manor  has  for  her 
ploughman's  lump  of  fat  bacon. 

SOR  the  creative  artist  stim- 
ulants are  especially  dan- 
gerous, since  they  produce 
that  terrible  dream-glamour 
in  which  the  ugly,  the  grotesque,  the 
wicked,  the  morbific  begin  to  fasci- 
nate and  obsess  instead  of  disgusting. 
This  effect,  however  faint  it  may  be, 
is  always  produced  in  some  degree  by 
drugs.  The  mark  left  on  a  novel  in  the 
"  Leisure  Hour  "  by  a  cup  of  tea  may 
be  imperceptible  to  a  bishop's  wife 
who  has  just  had  two  cups ;  but  the 
effect  is  there  as  certainly  as  if  De 
Quincey's  eight  thousand  drops  of 
laudanum  had  been  substituted. 
6 


TO  CHURCH. 
II 

Y  a   very  little  experi- 


mm 

Srj^Aj^  letters  will  convince  any 
22^=^£jopen-minded  person  that 
abstinence,  pure  and  simple,  is  not  a 
practicable  remedy  for  this  state  of 
things.  There  is  a  considerable  com- 
mercial demand  for  maudlin  or  night- 
marish art  and  literature  which  no 
sober  person  would  produce,  the  man- 
ufacture of  which  must  accordingly 
be  frankly  classed  industrially  with 
the  unhealthy  trades,  and  morally 
with  the  manufacture  of  unwholesome 
sweets  for  children  or  the  distilling  of 
gin.  What  the  victims  of  this  industry 
call  imagination  and  artistic  faculty  is 
nothing  but  attenuated  delirium  tre- 
mens, like  Pasteur's  attenuated  hy- 
drophobia. It  is  useless  to  encumber 
an  argument  with  these  predestined 
children  of  perdition.  The  only  profit- 
able cases  are  those  to  consider  of 
people  engaged  in  the  healthy  pursuit 

7 


ON  GOING 

of  those  arts  which  afford  scope  for 
the  greatest  mental  and  physical  en- 
ergy, the  clearest  and  acutest  reason 
and  the  most  elevated  perception. 
Work  of  this  kind  requires  an  intensi- 
ty of  energy  of  which  no  ordinary  la- 
bourer or  routine  official  can  form  any 
conception.  If  the  dreams  of  Keeley- 
ism  could  be  so  far  realized  as  to 
transmute  human  brain  energy  into 
vulgar  explosive  force,  the-  head  of 
Shakespere,  used  as  a  bombshell, 
might  conceivably  blow  England  out 
of  the  sea.  At  all  events,  the  succes- 
sion of  efforts  by  which  a  Shaksperean 
play,  a  Beethoven  symphony,  or  a 
Wagner  music-drama  is  produced, 
though  it  may  not  overtax  Shakespere, 
Beethoven  or  Wagner,  must  certainly 
tax  even  them  to  the  utmost,  and 
would  be  as  prodigiously  impossible 
to  the  average  professional  man  as 
the  writing  of  an  ordinary  leading  ar- 
ticle to  a  ploughman. 


TO  CHURCH. 

>H  AT  is  called  profession- 
al work  is,  in  point  of  se- 
rverity,  just  what  you 
►choose  to  make  it;  either 
commonplace,  easy  and  requiring  only 
extensive  industry  to  be  lucrative,  or 
else  distinguished,  difficult  and  exact- 
ing the  fiercest  intensive  industry  in 
return,  after  a  probation  of  twenty 
years  or  so,  for  authority,  reputation 
and  an  income  only  sufficient  for  sim- 
ple habits  and  plain  living.  The  whole 
professional  world  lies  between  these 
two  extremes.  At  the  one,  you  have 
the  man  to  whom  his  profession  is 
only  a  means  of  making  himself  and 
his  family  comfortable  and  prosper- 
ous :  at  the  other,  you  have  the  man 
who  sacrifices  everything  and  every- 
body, himself  included,  to  the  perfec- 
tion of  his  work — to  the  passion  for 
efficiency  which  is  the  true  master- 
passion  of  the  artist  *^S»  At  the  one, 
work  is  a  necessary  evil  and  money- 
making  a  pleasure ;  at  the  other,  work 
is  the  objective  realization  of  life  and 

9 


ON  GOING 

moneymaking  a  nuisance.  At  the  one, 
men  drink  and  drug  to  make  them- 
selves comfortable ;  at  the  other,  to 
stimulate  their  working  faculty  (gb 
Preach  mere  abstinence  to  the  one, 
and  you  are  preaching  nothing  but 
diminution  of  happiness.  Preach  it  to 
the  other,  and  you  are  proposing  a  re- 
duction of  efficiency  if  If  you  are  to 
prevail,  you  must  propose  a  substi- 
tute. And  the  only  one  I  have  yet  been 
able  to  hit  on  is — going  to  church. 


in 

kw^JT  will  not  be  disputed,  I  pre- 
*^  sume,  that  an  unstimulated  $£ 
L  saint  can  work  as  hard,  as  long, 
frj  I  &l  as  finety  anc*>  on  occasion,  as 
QK\  fiercely,  as  a  stimulated  sinner. 
aSRecuperation,  recreation,  in- 
spiration seem  to  come  to  the  saint 
far  more  surely  than  to  the  man  who 
grows  coarser  and  fatter  with  every 
additional  hundred  a  year,  and  who 
calls  the  saint  an  ascetic.  A  compar- 
ison of  the  works  of  our  carnivorous 
10 


TO  CHURCH. 

drunkard  poets  with  those  of  Shelley, 
or  of  Dr.  Johnson's  dictionary  with 
that  of  the  vegetarian  Littre,  is  suffi- 
cient to  show  that  the  secret  of  attain- 
ing the  highest  eminence  either  in 
poetry  or  in  dictionary  compiling  (and 
all  fine  literature  lies  between  the 
two),  is  to  be  found  neither  in  alcohol 
nor  in  our  monstrous  habit  of  bring- 
ing millions  of  useless  and  disagree- 
able animals  into  existence  for  the  ex- 
press purpose  of  barbarously  slaugh- 
tering them,  roasting,  their  corpses 
and  eating  them.  I  have  myself  tried 
the  experiment  of  not  eating  meat  or 
drinking  tea,  coffee  or  spirits  for  more 
than  a  dozen  years  past,  without,  as 
far  as  I  can  discover,  placing  myself 
at  more  than  my  natural  disadvan- 
tages relatively  to  those  colleagues  of 
mine  who  patronize  the  slaughter- 
house and  the  distillery. 

JUT  then  I  go  to  church.  If 
lyou  should  chance  to  see,  in 
]a  country  church-yard,  a  bi- 
Jcycle  leaning  against  a  tomb- 

ii 


ON  GOING 

stone,  you  are  not  unlikely  to  find  me 
inside  the  church  if  it  is  old  enough 
or  new  enough  to  be  fit  for  its  pur- 
pose. There  I  find  rest  without  lan- 
guor and  recreation  without  excite- 
ment, both  of  a  quality  unknown  to 
the  traveller  who  turns  from  the  vil- 
lage church  to  the  village  inn  and 
-^  seeks  to  renew  himself  with  shandy- 
gaff. Any  place  where  men  dwell,  vil- 
lage or  city,  is  a  reflection  of  the  con- 
sciousness of  every  single  man.  In 
my  consciousness  there  is  a  market, 
a  garden,  a  dwelling,  a  workshop,  a 
lover's  walk — above  all,  a  cathedral. 
>ESjj3SZ2Y  appeal   to   the   master- 

uw  I  s^(4Bl^u^^er  *s  :  Mirror  this  ca- 
Iv  1  t^Wthedral  for  me  in  enduring 
'&  -  m  jp^jstone ;  make  it  with  hands  ; 


let  it  direct  its  sure  and  clear  appeal 
to  my  senses,  so  that  when  my  spirit 
is  vaguely  groping  after  an  elusive 
mood  my  eye  shall  be  caught  by  the 
skyward  tower,  showing  me  where, 
within  the  cathedral,  I  may  find  my 
way  to  the  cathedral  within  me.  With 
12 


TO  CHURCH. 

a  right  knowledge  of  this  great  func- 
tion of  the  cathedral  builder,  and  craft 
enough  to  set  an  arch  on  a  couple  of 
pillars,  make  doors  and  windows  in  a 
good  wall  and  put  a  roof  over  them, 
any  modern  man  might,  it  seems  to 
me,  build  churches  as  they  built  them 
in  the  middle  ages,  if  only  the  pious 
founders  and  the  parson  would  let 
him  ££ 

For  want  of  that  knowledge,  gentle- 
men of  Mr.  Pecksniff's  profession 
make  fashionable  pencil  drawings, 
presenting  what  Mr.  Pecksniffs  cre- 
ator elsewhere  calls  an  architectoor- 
alooral  appearance,  with  which,  hav- 
ing delighted  the  darkened  eyes  of  the 
committee  and  the  clerics,  they  have 
them  translated  into  bricks  and  ma- 
sonry and  take  a  shilling  in  the  pound 
on  the  bill,  with  the  result  that  the 
bishop  may  consecrate  the  finished 
building  until  he  is  black  in  the  face 
without  making  a  real  church  of  it. 
Can  it  be  doubted  by  the  pious  that 
babies  baptized  in  such  places  go  to 

13 


ON  GOING 

limbo  if  they  die  before  qualifying 
themselves  for  other  regions;  that 
prayers  said  there  do  not  count ;  nay, 
that  such  purposeless,  respectable- 
looking  interiors  are  irreconcilable 
with  the  doctrine  of  Omnipresence, 
since  the  bishop's  blessing  is  no  spell 
of  black  magic  to  imprison  Omnipo- 
tence in  a  place  that  must  needs  be 
intolerable  to  Omniscience  ? 

T  all  events,  the  godhead 
in  me,  certified  by  the 
tenth  chapter  of  St.  John's 
Gospel  to  those  who  will 
admit  no  other  authority,  refuses  to 
enter  these  barren  places.  This  is  per- 
haps fortunate,  since  they  are  gener- 
ally kept  locked ;  and  even  when  they 
are  open,  they  are  jealously  guarded 
in  the  spirit  of  that  Westminster  Ab- 
bey verger  who,  not  long  ago,  had  a 
stranger  arrested  for  kneeling  down, 
and  explained,  when  remonstrated 
with,  that  if  that  sort  of  thing  were 
tolerated,  they  would  soon  have  peo- 
ple praying  all  over  the  place.  Happi- 
14 


TO  CHURCH. 

ly,  it  is  not  so  everywhere.  You  may 
now  ride  or  tramp  into  a  village  with 
a  fair  chance  of  finding  the  church- 
door  open  and  a  manuscript  placard 
in  the  porch,  whereby  the  parson, 
speaking  no  less  as  a  man  and  a 
brother  than  as  the  porter  of  the  House 
Beautiful,  gives  you  to  understand 
that  the  church  is  open  always  for 
those  who  have  any  use  for  it. 

'NSIDE  such  churches  you 
will  often  find  not  only  care- 
fully cherished  work  from 
the  ages  of  faith,  which  you 
expect  to  find  noble  and  lovely,  but 
sometimes  a  quite  modern  furnishing 
of  the  interior  and  draping  of  the  altar, 
evidently  done,  not  by  contract  with 
a  firm  celebrated  for  its  illustrated 
catalogues,  but  by  some  one  who 
loved  and  understood  the  church,  and 
who,  when  baffled  in  the  search  for 
beautiful  things,  had  at  least  suc- 
ceeded in  avoiding  indecently  com- 
mercial and  incongruous  ones.  And 
then  the  search  for  beauty  is  not  al- 

15 


ON  GOING 

ways  baffled  if  When  the  dean  and 
chapter  of  a  cathedral  want  not  mere- 
ly an  ugly  but  a  positively  beastly  pul- 
pit to  preach  from — something  like 
the  Albert  Memorial  canopy,  only 
much  worse — they  always  get  it,  im- 
probable and  unnatural  as  the  enter- 
prise is.  Similarly,  when  an  enlight- 
ened country  parson  wants  an  unpre- 
tending tub  to  thump,  with  a  few 
pretty  panels  in  it  and  a  pleasant 
shape  generally,  he  will,  with  a  little 
perseverance,  soon  enough  find  a 
craftsman  who  has  picked  up  the 
thread  of  the  tradition  of  his  craft  from 
the  time  when  that  craft  was  a  fine 
art — as  may  be  done  nowadays  more 
easily  than  was  possible  before  we 
had  cheap  trips  and  cheap  photo- 
graphs— and  who  is  only  too  glad  to 
be  allowed  to  try  his  hand  at  some- 
thing in  the  line  of  that  tradition. 


months  ago,  I  came  upon  a 

little  church,  built  long  be- 

g  fore  the  sense  of  beauty  and 


16 


TO  CHURCH. 

devotion  had  been  supplanted  by  the 
sense  of  respectability  and  talent,  in 
which  some  neat  panels  left  by  a  mod- 
ern carver  had  been  painted  with  a 
few  saints  on  gold  backgrounds,  evi- 
dently by  some  woman  who  had  tried 
to  learn  what  she  could  from  the  ear- 
ly Florentine  masters  and  had  done 
the  work  in  the  true  votive  spirit, 
without  any  taint  of  the  amateur  ex- 
hibiting his  irritating  and  futile  imita- 
tions of  the  celebrated  artist  business. 
From  such  humble  but  quite  accept- 
able efforts,  up  to  the  masterpiece  in 
stained  glass  by  William  Morris  and 
Burne-Jones  which  occasionally  as- 
tonishes you  in  places  far  more  re- 
mote and  unlikely  than  Birmingham 
or  Oxford,  convincing  evidence  may 
be  picked  up  here  and  there  that  the 
decay  of  religious  art  from  the  six- 
teenth century  to  the  nineteenth  was 
not  caused  by  any  atrophy  of  the  ar- 
tistic faculty,  but  was  an  eclipse  of 
religion  by  science  and  commerce. 


17 


1 


ON  GOING 

rT  is  an  odd  period  to  look 
back  on  from  the  church- 
goer's point  of  view — those 
i  eclipsed  centuries  calling 
their  predecessors  "the  dark  ages," 
and  trying  to  prove  their  own  piety 
by  raising,  at  huge  expense,  gigantic 
monuments  in  enduring  stone  (not 
very  enduring,  though,  sometimes)  of 
their  infidelity.  Go  to  Milan,  and  join 
the  rush  of  tourists  to  its  petrified 
christening-cake  of  a  cathedral.  The 
projectors  of  that  costly  ornament 
spared  no  expense  to  prove  that  their 
devotion  was  ten  times  greater  than 
that  of  the  builders  of  San  Ambrogio. 
But  every  pound  they  spent  only  re- 
corded in  marble  that  their  devotion 
was  a  hundred  times  less  t^s  Go  on  to 
Florence  and  try  San  Lorenzo,  a  real- 
ly noble  church  (which  the  Milan 
Cathedral  is  not),  Brunelleschi's  mas- 
terpiece. You  cannot  but  admire  its 
intellectual  command  of  form,  its  un- 
affected dignity,  its  power  and  accom- 
plishment, its  masterly  combination 
18 


TO  CHURCH. 

of  simplicity  and  homogeneity  of  plan 
with  elegance  and  variety  of  detail : 
you  are  even  touched  by  the  retention 
of  that  part  of  the  beauty  of  the  older 
time  which  was  perceptible  to  the 
Renascent  intellect  before  its  wean- 
ing from  heavenly  food  had  been  fol- 
lowed by  starvation.  You  understand 
the  deep  and  serious  respect  which 
Michael  Angelo  had  for  Brunelleschi 
— why  he  said  "  I  can  do  different 
work,  but  not  better."  But  a  few  min- 
utes' walk  to  Santa  Maria  Novella  or 
Santa  Croce,  or  a  turn  in  the  steam- 
tram  to  San  Miniato,  will  bring  you 
to  churches  built  a  century  or  two 
earlier ;  and  you  have  only  to  cross 
their  thresholds  to  feel,  almost  before 
you  have  smelt  the  incense,  the  dif- 
ference between  a  church  built  to  the 
pride  and  glory  of  God  (not  to  men- 
tion the  Medici)  and  one  built  as  a 
sanctuary  shielded  by  God's  presence 
from  pride  and  glory  and  all  the  other 
burdens  of  life.  In  San  Lorenzo  up 
goes  your  head — every  isolating  ad- 

*9 


ON  GOING 

vantage  you  have  of  talent,  power  or 
rank  asserts  itself  with  thrilling  poig- 
nancy. 

^N  the  older  churches  you 
forget  yourself,  and  are  the 
I  equal  of  the  beggar  at  the 
'door,  standing  on  ground 
made  holy  by  that  labour  in  which  we 
have  discovered  the  reality  of  prayer. 
You  may  also  hit  on  a  church  like  the 
Santissima  Annunziata,  carefully  and 
expensively  brought  up  to  date,  quite 
in  our  modern  church-restoring  man- 
ner, by  generations  of  princes  chew- 
ing the  cud  of  the  Renascence ;  and 
there  you  will  see  the  worship  of  glory 
and  the  self-sufficiency  of  intellect 
giving  way  to  the  display  of  wealth 
and  elegance  as  a  guarantee  of  social 
importance — in  another  'word,  snob- 
bery z& 

In  later  edifices  you  see  how  intellect, 
finding  its  worshippers  growing  cold- 
er, had  to  abandon  its  dignity  and  cut 
capers  to  attract  attention,  giving  the 
grotesque,  the  eccentric,  the  baroque, 
20 


TO  CHURCH. 

even  the  profane  and  blasphemous, 
until,  finally,  it  is  thoroughly  snubbed 
out  of  its  vulgar  attempts  at  self-as- 
sertion, and  mopes  conventionally  in 
our  modern  churches  of  St.  Nicholas 
Without  and  St.  Walker  Within, 
locked  up,  except  at  service  time,  from 
week's  end  to  week's  end  without 
ever  provoking  the  smallest  protest 
from  a  public  only  too  glad  to  have  an 
excuse  for  not  going  into  them.  You 
may  read  the  same  history  of  the  hu- 
man soul  in  any  art  you  like  to  select ; 
but  he  who  runs  may  read  it  in  the 
streets  by  looking  at  the  churches. 

IV 

ONSIDER  for  a  moment 
the  prodigious  increase  of 
the  population  of  Christen- 
dom since  the  church  of  San 
Zeno  Maggiore  was  built  at  Verona, 
in  the  twelfth  and  thirteenth  centu- 
ries. Let  a  man  go  and  renew  himself 
for  half  an  hour  occasionally  in  San 
Zeno,  and  he  need  eat  no  corpses,  nor 

21 


ON  GOING 

drink  any  drugs  or  drams  to  sustain 
him.  Yet  not  even  all  Verona,  much 
less  all  Europe,  could  resort  to 
San  Zeno  in  the  thirteenth  century ; 
whereas,  in  the  nineteenth,  a  thou- 
sand perfect  churches  would  be  but 
as  a  thousand  drops  of  rain  on  Sa- 
hara. Yet  in  London,  with  near  five 
millions  of  people  in  it,  how  many 
perfect  or  usable  churches  are  there  ? 
And  of  the  few  we  have,  how  many 
are  apparent  to  the  wayfarer  ?  "Who, 
for  instance,  would  guess  from  the  re- 
pulsive exterior  of  Westminster  Ab- 
bey that  there  are  beautiful  chapels 
and  a  noble  nave  within,  or  cloisters 
without,  on  the  hidden  side  ? 

REMEMBER,  a  dozen  or 
so  years  ago,  Parson  Shut- 
tleworth,  of  St.  Nicholas 
Cole  Abbey  in  the  city,  tried 
to  persuade  the  city  man  to  spend  his 
mid-day  hour  of  rest  in  church ;  guar- 
anteeing him  immunity  from  sermons, 
prayers  and  collections,  and  even 
making  the  organ  discourse  Bach  and 
22 


TO  CHURCH. 

Wagner,  instead  of  Goss  and  Jackson. 
This  singular  appeal  to  a  people  walk- 
ing in  darkness  was  quite  successful : 
the  mid-day  hour  is  kept  to  this  day  ; 
but  Parson  Shuttleworth  has  to  speak 
for  five  minutes — by  general  and  in- 
sistent request — as  Housekeeper,  al- 
though he  has  placed  a  shelf  of  books 
in  the  church  for  those  who  would 
rather  read  than  listen  to  him  or  the 
organ  if  This  was  a  good  thought ; 
for  all  inspired  books  should  be  read 
either  in  church  or  on  the  eternal 
hills.  St.  Nicholas  Cole  Abbey  makes 
you  feel,  the  moment  you  enter  it, 
that  you  are  in  a  rather  dingy  rococo 
banqueting  room,  built  for  a  city  com- 
pany. Corpulence  and  comfort  are 
written  on  every  stone  of  it.  Consid- 
ering that  money  is  dirt  cheap  now 
in  the  city,  it  is  strange  that  Mr.  Shut- 
tleworth cannot  get  twenty  thousand 
pounds  to  build  a  real  church  j^jk  He 
•would,  soon  enough,  if  the  city  knew 
what  a  church  was.  The  twenty  thou- 
sand  pounds   need    not    be   wasted, 

23 


ON  GOING 

either,  on  a  professional  "  architect." 
TOHILE  lately  walking  in  a 
\polite  suburb  of  New  Cas- 
ftle,  I  saw  a  church — a 
►new  church — with,  of  all 
things,  a  detached  campanile  ;  at  sight 
of  which  I  could  not  help  exclaiming 
profanely:  <(How  the  deuce  did  you 
find  your  way  to  New  Castle  ?  "  So  I 
went  in  and,  after  examining  the  place 
with  much  astonishment,  addressed 
myself  to  the  sexton,  who  happened 
to  be  about.  I  asked  him  who  built 
the  church,  and  he  gave  me  the  name 
of  Mr.  Mitchell,  who  turned  out,  how- 
ever, to  be  the  pious  founder — a  ship- 
builder prince,  with  some  just  notion 
of  his  princely  function.  But  this  was 
not  what  I  wanted  to  know;  so  I 
asked  who  was  the — the  word  stuck 
in  my  throat  a  little — the  architect. 
He,  it  appeared,  was  one  Spence. 
"  Was  that  marble  carving  in  the  altar 
and  that  mosaic  decoration  round  the 
chancel  part  of  his  design  ?"  said  I. 
"  Yes,"  said  the  sexton,  with  a  certain 
24 


TO  CHURCH. 

surliness  as  if  he  suspected  me  of  dis- 
approving. "The  ironwork  is  good,"  I 
remarked,  to  appease  him  ;  "  who  did 
that?"  "Mr.  Spence  did."  "Who 
carved  that  wooden  figure  of  St. 
George  ?  "  (the  patron  saint  of  the  ed- 
ifice). "Mr.  Spence  did."  "Who 
painted  those  four  panels  in  the  dado 
with  figures  in  oil?"  "Mr.  Spence 
did :  he  meant  them  to  be  at  intervals 
round  the  church,  but  we  put  them 
all  together  by  mistake."  "  Then,  per- 
haps, he  designed  the  stained  win- 
dows, too?"  "Yes,  most  of  'em."  I 
got  so  irritated  at  this — feeling  that 
Spence  was  going  too  far — that  I  re- 
marked sarcastically  that  no  doubt 
Mr.  Spence  designed  Mr.  Mitchell's 
ships  as  well,  which  turned  out  to  be 
the  case  as  far  as  the  cabins  were  con- 
cerned. 

HIS  Mr.  Spence  is  an  artist- 
craftsman  with  a  vengeance 
f ,  Many  people,  I  learnt,  came 
^Sggjp^  to  see  the  church, especially 
in  the  first  eighteen  months  ;  but  some 

25 


ON  GOING 

of  the  congregation  thought  it  too  or- 
namental. (At  St.  Nicholas  Cole  Ab- 
bey, by  the  way,  some  of  the  parish- 
ioners objected  at  first  to  Mr.  Shut- 
tleworth  as  being  too  religious.)  Now, 
as  a  matter  of  fact,  this  Newcastle 
church  of  St.  George's  is  not  orna- 
mental enough.  Under  modern  com- 
mercial conditions,  it  is  impossible  to 
get  from  the  labour  in  the  building 
trade  that  artistic  quality  in  the  actual 
masonry  which  makes  a  good  mediae- 
val building  independent  of  applied 
ornament  £jb  Wherever  Mr.  Spence's 
artist's  hand  has  passed  over  the  in- 
terior surface,  the  church  is  beautiful. 
Why  should  his  hand  not  pass  over 
every  inch  of  it  ?  It  is  true,  the  com- 
plete finishing  of  a  large  church  of  the 
right  kind  has  hardly  ever  been  car- 
ried through  by  one  man.  Sometimes 
the  man  has  died;  more  often  the 
money  has  failed.  But  in  this  instance 
the  man  is  not  dead;  and  surely 
money  cannot  fail  in  the  most  fash- 
ionable suburb  of  Newcastle  J£  The 
26 


TO  CHURCH. 

chancel  with  its  wonderful  mosaics, 
the  baptistry  with  its  ornamental 
stones,  the  four  painted  panels  of  the 
dado,  are  only  samples  of  what  the 
whole  interior  should  and  might  be. 
All  that  cold  contract  masonry  must 
be  redeemed,  stone  by  stone,  by  the 
travail  of  the  artist-churchmaker.  No- 
body, not  even  an  average  respectable 
Sabbathkeeper,  will  dare  to  say  then 
that  it  is  over-decorated,  however  out 
of  place  in  it  he  may  feel  his  ugly 
Sunday  clothes  and  his  wife's  best 
bonnet. 

OWBEIT,  this  church  of 
St.  George's  in  New  Cas- 
tle proves  my  point,  name- 
ly, that  churches  fit  for 
their  proper  use  can  still  be  built  by 
men  who  follow  the  craft  of  Orcagna 
instead  of  the  profession  of  Mr  Peck- 
sniff, and  built  cheaply,  too ;  for  I 
took  the  pains  to  ascertain  what  this 
large  church  cost,  and  found  that 
£"30,000  was  well  over  the  mark.  For 
aught  I  know,  there  may  be  dozens 

27 


ON  GOING 

of  such  churches  rising  in  the  coun- 
try ;  for  Mr.  Spence's  talent,  though 
evidently  a  rare  and  delicate  one,  can- 
not be  unique,  and  what  he  has  done 
in  his  own  style  other  men  can  do  in 
theirs,  if  they  want  to,  and  are  given 
the  means  by  those  who  can  make 
money,  and  are  capable  of  the  same 
want. 

jSSgggSJHERE  is  still  one  serious 
w£&3&  obstacle  to  the  use  of  ^^£> 
SISLgJjm  churches    on    the  very  day 
^gJSaffilwhen  most  people  are  best 
able  and  most  disposed  to  visit  them. 
I  mean,  of  course,  the  services.  When 
I  was  a  little  boy,  I  was  compelled  to 
go  to  church  on  Sunday ;  and  though 
I  escaped  from  that  intolerable  bond- 
age before  I  was  ten,  it  prejudiced  me 
so  violently  against  churchgoing  that 
twenty  years  elapsed  before,  in  for- 
eign lands  and  in  pursuit  of  works  of 
art,    I   became  once  more  a  church- 
goer. To  this    day,   my   flesh  creeps 
when  I  recall  that  genteel  suburban 
Irish  Protestant  church,  built  by  Ro- 
28 


TO  CHURCH. 

man  Catholic  workmen  who  would 
have  considered  themselves  damned 
had  they  crossed  its  threshold  after- 
wards. Every  separate  stone,  every 
pane  of  glass,  every  fillet  of  orna- 
mental ironwork — half-dog-collar,half- 
coronet — in  that  building  must  have 
sowed  a  separate  evil  passion  in  my 
young  heart  j£  Yes  ;  all  the  vulgarity, 
savagery,  and  bad  blood  which  has 
marred  my  literary  work,  was  cer- 
tainly laid  upon  me  in  that  house  of 
Satan  ! 

3255S30W  the  mere  nullity  of  the 
puilding  could  make  no  pos- 
itive impression  on  me ; 
Jbut  what  could,  and  did, 
were  the  unnaturally  motionless  fig- 
ures of  the  congregation  in  their  Sun- 
day clothes  and  bonnets,  and  their  set 
faces,  pale  with  the  malignant  rigidity 
produced  by  the  suppression  of  all  ex- 
pression. And  yet  these  people  were 
always  moving  and  watching  one  an- 
other by  stealth,  as  convicts  commu- 
nicate with  one  another.  So  was  I.  I 

29 


ON  GOING 

had  been  told  to  keep  my  restless  lit- 
tle limbs  still  all  through  those  inter- 
minable hours ;  not  to  talk ;  and, 
above  all,  to  be  happy  and  holy  there 
and  glad  that  I  was  not  a  wicked  little 
boy  playing  in  the  fields  instead  of 
worshipping  God.  I  hypocritically  ac- 
quiesced;  but  the  state  of  my  con- 
science may  be  imagined,  especially 
as  I  implicitly  believed  that  all  the 
rest  of  the  congregation  were  perfectly 
sincere  and  good.  I  remember  at  that 
time  dreaming  one  night  that  I  was 
dead  and  had  gone  to  heaven. 

ND  the  picture  of  heaven 
which  the  efforts  of  the 
then  Established  Church 
rjof  Ireland  had  conveyed  to 
my  childish  imagination,  was  a  wait- 
ing room  with  walls  of  pale  sky-col- 
oured tabbinet,  and  a  pew-like  bench 
running  all  round,  except  at  one  cor- 
ner, where  there  was  a  door.  I  was, 
somehow,  aware  that  God  was  in  the 
next  room,  accessible  through  that 
door.  I  was  seated  on  the  bench  with 
30 


TO  CHURCH. 

my  ankles  tightly  interlaced  to  prevent 
my  legs  dangling,  behaving  myself 
with  all  my  might  before  the  grown- 
up people,  who  all  belonged  to  the 
Sunday  congregation,  and  were  either 
sitting  on  the  bench  as  if  at  church  or 
else  moving  solemnly  in  and  out  as  if 
there  were  a  dead  person  in  the  house. 
A  grimly-handsome  lady  who  usually 
sat  in  a  corner  seat  near  me  in  church, 
and  whom  I  believed  to  be  thoroughly 
conversant  with  the  arrangements  of 
the  Almighty,  was  to  introduce  me 
presently  into  the  next  room — a  mo- 
ment which  I  was  supposed  to  await 
with  joy  and  enthusiasm. 
£2g53H|EALLY,of  course, my  heart 

sank  like  lead  within  me  at 
i  the  thought ;  for  I  felt  that 

my  feeble  affectation  of  piety 
could  not  impose  on  Omniscience, 
and  that  one  glance  of  that  all-search- 
ing eye  would  discover  that  I  had 
been  allowed  to  come  to  heaven  by 
mistake  %  Unfortunately  for  the  in- 
terest of  this  narrative,  I  awoke,  or 

3i 


ON  GOING 

wandered  off  into  another  dream,  be- 
fore the  critical  moment  arrived.  But 
it  goes  far  enough  to  show  that  I  was 
by  no  means  an  insusceptible  subject ; 
indeed,  I  am  sure,  from  other  early 
experiences  of  mine,  that  if  I  had  been 
turned  loose  in  a  real  church,  and  al- 
lowed to  wander  and  stare  about,  or 
hear  noble  music  there  instead  of  that 
most  accursed  Te  Deum  of  Jackson's 
and  a  senseless  droning  of  the  Old 
Hundredth,  I  should  never  have 
seized  the  opportunity  of  a  great  evan- 
gelical revival,  which  occurred  when 
I  was  still  in  my  teens,  to  begin  my 
literary  career  with  a  letter  to  the 
Press  (which  was  duly  printed),  an- 
nouncing with  inflexible  materialistic 
logic,  and  to  the  extreme  horror  of  my 
respectable  connections,  that  I  was 
an  atheist. 

>HEN,  later  on,  I  was  led 
|to  the  study  of  the  econ- 
romic  basis  of  the  respect- 
lability  of  that  and  similar 
congregations,  I  was  inexpressibly 
32 


TO  CHURCH. 

relieved  to  find  that  it  represented  a 
mere  passing  phase  of  industrial  con- 
fusion, and  could  never  have  substan- 
tiated its  claims  to  my  respect  if,  as  a 
child,  I  had  been  able  to  bring  it  to 
book  sfj  To  this  very  day,  whenever 
there  is  the  slightest  danger  of  my 
being  mistaken  for  a  votary  of  the 
blue  tabbinet  waiting-room  or  a  sup- 
porter of  that  morality  in  which  wrong 
and  right,  base  and  noble,  evil  and 
good,  really  mean  nothing  more  than 
the  kitchen  and  the  drawing-room,  I 
hasten  to  claim  honourable  exemp- 
tion, as  atheist  and  socialist,  from 
any  such  complicity. 

v 

NO  when  I  at  last  took  to 
[church-going  again,  a  kin- 
[dred  difficulty  beset  me, 
[especially  in  Roman  Cath- 
olic countries.  In  Italy,  for  instance, 
churches  are  used  in  such  a  way  that 
priceless  pictures  become  smeared 
with  filthy  tallow  soot, and  have  some- 

33 


ON  GOING 

times  to  be  rescued  by  the  temporal 
power  and  placed  in  national  galleries. 
But  worse  than  this  are  the  innumer- 
able daily  services  which  disturb  the 
truly  religious  visitor.  If  these  were 
decently  and  intelligently  conducted 
by  genuine  mystics  to  whom  the  Mass 
was  no  mere  rite  or  miracle,  but  a 
real  communion,  the  celebrants  might 
reasonably  claim  a  place  in  the  church 
as  their  share  of  the  common  human 
right  to  its  use  >4^$>  But  the  average 
Italian  priest,  personally  uncleanly, 
and  with  chronic  catarrh  of  the  nose 
and  throat,  produced  and  maintained 
by  sleeping  and  living  in  frowsy,  ill- 
ventilated  rooms,  punctuating  his  gab- 
bled Latin  only  by  expectorative 
hawking,  and  making  the  decent  guest 
sicken  and  shiver  and  long  for  ser- 
mons in  stone,  green  fields  and  tem- 
ples not  made  with  hands ;  this  un- 
seemly wretch  of  a  priest  should  be 
seized  and  put  out,  bell,  book,  candle 
and  all,  until  he  learns  to  behave  him- 
self. 
34 


TO  CHURCH. 


:~S^:QHE  English  tourist  is  often 
lectured  for  his  inconsider- 

p  *  AHHd  ate  behaviour  in  Italian  ^i 
^SJSSsBii^  churches,  for  walking  about 
during  service,  talking  loudly,  thrust- 
ing himself  rudely  between  a  wor- 
shipper and  an  altar  to  examine  a 
painting,  even  for  stealing  chips  of 
stone  and  scrawling  his  name  on 
statues.  But  as  far  as  the  mere  dis- 
turbance of  the  service  is  concerned, 
and  the  often  very  evident  disposition 
of  the  tourist — especially  the  experi- 
enced tourist — to  regard  the  priest 
and  his  congregation  as  troublesome 
intruders,  a  week  spent  in  Italy  will 
convince  any  unprejudiced  person 
that  this  is  a  perfectly  reasonable  at- 
titude. I  have  seen  inconsiderate  Brit- 
ish behaviour  often  enough  both  in 
church  and  out  of  it.  The  slow-witted 
Englishman  who  refuses  to  get  out  of 
the  way  of  the  Host,  and  looks  at  the 
bellringer  going  before  it  with  "  Where 
the  devil  are  you  shoving  to?  M  writ- 
ten in  every  pucker  of  his  free-born 

35 


ON  GOING 

British  brow,  is  a  familiar  figure  to 
me  ;  but  I  have  never  seen  any  stran- 
ger behave  so  insufferably  as  the  offi- 
cials of  the  church  habitually  do. 
F27HT  is  the  sacristan  who  teaches 
^  you,  'when  once  you  are  com- 
t  mitted  to  tipping  him,  not  to 
M  waste  your  good  manners  on 
"i kneeling  worshippers  who  are 
•snatching  a  moment  from  their 
daily  round  of  drudgery  and  starva- 
tion to  be  comforted  by  the  Blessed 
Virgin  or  one  of  the  saints ;  it  is  the 
officiating  priest  who  makes  you  un- 
derstand that  the  congregation  are 
past  shocking  by  any  indecency  that 
you  would  dream  of  committing,  and 
that  the  black  looks  of  the  congrega- 
tion are  directed  at  the  foreigner  and 
the  heretic  only,  and  imply  a  denial 
of  your  right  as  a  human  being  to 
your  share  of  the  use  of  the  church. 
That  right  should  be  unflinchingly  as- 
serted on  all  proper  occasions  >4^&>  I 
know  no  contrary  right  by  which  the 
great  Catholic  churches  made  for  the 
36 


TO  CHURCH. 

world  by  the  great  church-builders 
should  be  monopolized  by  any  sect  as 
against  any  man  who  desires  to  use 
them. 

Y  own  faith  is  clear :  I  am 

a  resolute  Protestant ;  I  be- 

y/FJ  aeve  *n  ^e  Holy  Catholic 

gg<;  Church  ;  in  the  Holy  Trin- 


ity  of  Father,  Son  (or  Mother,  Daugh- 
ter) and  Spirit ;  in  the  Communion  of 
Saints,  the  Life  to  Come,  the  Immac- 
ulate Conception,  and  the  everyday 
reality  of  Godhead  and  the  Kingdom 
of  Heaven.  Also  I  believe  that  salva- 
tion depends  on  redemption  from  be- 
lief in  miracles ;  and  I  regard  St. 
Athanasius  as  an  irreligious  fool — 
that  is,  in  the  only  serious  sense  of 
the  word,  a  damned  fool.  I  pity  the 
poor  neurotic  who  can  say,  "  Man 
that  is  born  of  a  woman  hath  but  a 
short  time  to  live,  and  is  full  of  mis- 
ery," as  I  pity  a  maudlin  drunkard; 
and  I  know  that  the  real  religion  of 
to-day  was  made  possible  only  by  the 
materialist-physicists    and     atheist- 

37 


ON  GOING 

critics  who  performed  for  us  the  in- 
dispensable preliminary  operation  of 
purging  us  thoroughly  of  the  ignorant 
and  vicious  superstitions  which  were 
thrust  down  our  throats  as  religion  in 
our  helpless  childhood. 

rjjaOW  those  who  assume 
that  our  churches  are  the 
private  property  of  their 
sect  would  think  of  this 
profession  of  faith  of  mine  I  need  not 
describe.  But  am  I,  therefore,  to  be 
denied  access  to  the  place  of  spiritual 
recreation  which  is  my  inheritance 
as  much  as  theirs  ?  If,  for  example,  I 
desire  to  follow  a  good  old  custom  by 
pledging  my  love  to  my  wife  in  the 
church  of  our  parish,  why  should  I 
be  denied  due  record  in  the  registers 
unless  she  submits  to  have  a  moment 
of  deep  feeling  made  ridiculous  by  the 
reading  aloud  of  the  naive  imperti- 
nences of  St.  Peter,  who,  on  the  sub- 
ject of  Woman,  was  neither  Catholic 
nor  Christian,  but  a  boorish  Syrian 
fisherman. 
38 


TO  CHURCH. 

rF  I  want  to  name  a  child  in 
the  church,  the  prescribed 
I  service  may  be  more  touched 
^with  the  religious  spirit — 
once  or  twice  beautifully  touched — 
but,  on  the  whole,  it  is  time  to  dis- 
miss our  prayer-book  as  quite  rotten 
with  the  pessimism  of  the  age  which 
produced  it.  In  spite  of  the  stolen 
jewels  with  which  it  is  studded,  an 
age  of  strength  and  faith  and  noble 
activity  can  have  nothing  to  do  with 
it :  Caliban  might  have  constructed 
such  a  ritual  out  of  his  own  terror  of 
the  supernatural,  and  such  fragments 
of  the  words  of  the  saints  as  he  could 
dimly  feel  some  sort  of  glory  in  \0? 
My  demand  will  now  be  understood 
without  any  ceremonious  formulation 
of  it.  No  nation,  working  at  the  strain 
we  face,  can  live  cleanly  without  pub- 
lic houses  of  some  sort  in  which  to 
seek  rest,  refreshment  and  recreation. 
To  supply  that  vital  want  we  have 
the  drinking-shop  with  its  narcotic, 
stimulant    poisons,    the    conventicle 

39 


ON  GOING  TO  CHURCH. 

with  its  brimstone-flavoured  hot  gos- 
pel, and  the  church. 

'N  the  church  alone  can  our 
need  be  truly  met,  nor  even 
there  save  when  we  leave 
outside  the  door  the  materi- 
alizations that  help  us  to  believe  the 
incredible,  and  the  intellectualizations 
that  help  us  to  think  the  unthinkable, 
completing  the  refuse-heap  of  "isms" 
and  creeds  with  our  vain  lust  for  truth 
and  happiness,  and  going  in  without 
thought  or  belief  or  prayer  or  any 
other  vanity,  so  that  the  soul,  freed 
from  all  that  crushing  lumber,  may 
open  all  its  avenues  of  life  to  the  holy 
air  of  the  true  Catholic  Church. 


40 


SO  HERE  THEN  ENDETH  THE 
PREACHMENT  %  ON  GOING  TO 
CHURCH  %  BY  GEORGE  BER- 
NARD SHAW  **$&  DONE  INTO 
PRINT  BY  ELBERT  HUBBARD 
AT  THE  ROYCROFT  PRINTING 
SHOP  WHICH  IS  IN  EAST  AU- 
RORA, NEW  YORK,  U.  S.  A.  **£& 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 
This  book  is  DIJEon  the  last  date  stamped  below. 
Fine  sc] 


OCT  29  IP- 


-  \fiteKARY  I 

^    OCT    61 


tt\tf* 


AUG  &4196 


DEC 


200ct'6lDM 
OCT  g     |&j 


201^631^ 
m  STACKS 

JUL221964 


ftECCia.  DEC  5     1979 

161983- 


gtC. 


CW.0EC   3"© 


LD  21-100m-12,'46(A2012sl6)4120 


n  245 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 


/ 


b  0  If,  -  £ 


